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Topic: Mmmm! Feeling hungry...? (Read 23675 times)

You know what? I am begining to think that you are more like me* than I thought Uli, and as Mart is also the same personality type as me, maybe that's why all those FIREY emotions came flooding out. Like a TRIPLE TUTS INFERNO!

You know what? I am begining to think that you are more like me* than I thought Uli, and as Mart is also the same personality type as me, maybe that's why all those FIREY emotions came flooding out. Like a TRIPLE TUTS INFERNO!

The largest recall of beef in American history was ordered yesterday after the release of an undercover video showing injured or diseased cows being rammed with a forklift truck in an effort to get them on to their feet for slaughter (writes Chris Ayres in Los Angeles).

The recall involves 143million pounds (65,000 tonnes) of raw and frozen meat — enough to feed two burgers to every man, woman and child in the United States - although officials said that most of it had been eaten already. Schools in California and Washington State took beef off their menus yesterday as a precaution.

It is thought that some of the meat was sold to the In-N-Out Burger chain, which is popular with Los Angeles celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, who ate there after the 2003 Academy Awards. The restaurant group said that it stopped using the beef this month. The recall dates back to October 2006.

Federal regulations prohibit the slaughter of “downer cattle” — those unable to walk — as part of safeguards introduced last summer against “mad cow” disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The rule came from a case in 2004 when a cow in Washington state tested positive for BSE. Downer cattle are known to have weaker immune systems.

A hidden camera investigation by the Humane Society at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing company in Chino, California, found what appeared to be injured or diseased cattle being roused for slaughter with everything from a forklift truck to a high-pressure hose. One abattoir employee was filmed hitting a fallen cow in the face with a paddle.

The video, which was recorded at the end of last year, was handed to the police, who said that employees had used illegal methods in 11 different instances to force cattle into the slaughter box.

Ed Schafer, the US Secretary of Agriculture, said on Sunday that the federal Food Safety Inspection Service had suspended all of its contracts with the company. “I am dismayed by the inhumane handling of cattle that resulted in the violation of food-safety regulations,” Mr Schafer said. “It is extremely unlikely that these animals were at risk of BSE because of the multiple safeguards. However, this action is necessary because plant procedures violated USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] regulations.” (The Times 19th February 2008)

The recall involves 143million pounds (65,000 tonnes) of raw and frozen meat — enough to feed two burgers to every man, woman and child in the United States - although officials said that most of it had been eaten already. Schools in California and Washington State took beef off their menus yesterday as a precaution.

Mmmmm. Great. Most of it been eaten already. So they take beef off their menus? (Instead of investigating where it came from...) So they offer other meat instead? (Until there's a "scandal" as well...)

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist.

UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

"The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions," he told BBC News.

The FAO figure of 18% includes greenhouse gases released in every part of the meat production cycle - clearing forested land, making and transporting fertiliser, burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles, and the front and rear end emissions of cattle and sheep.

Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind's greenhouse gas footprint, according to the IPCC.

Scenes like this, with vast tracts of Amazonian rainforest razed to make way for cattle, are to become more common in Brazil as it continues its drive to expand its beef export industry, according to environmentalists.

Green activists say that country's determination to double its share of the world beef market is likely to undermine its new targets for halting Amazon rainforest destruction and reducing carbon emissions.

The South American country has the world's largest cattle herd and is already the biggest beef exporter on the planet. Now the Brazilian government is seeking to boost its share of the world beef market from 30 per cent to 60 per cent in the next decade.

Most of this growth will come in Amazonia, on pastureland created by cutting down rainforest, according to a report released today by Greenpeace. The cattle industry will be the main driver of deforestation, it argues.

And deforestation will mean, the environment group says, that Brazil will not be able to curb its massive carbon dioxide emissions – 75 per cent of them coming from deforestation. It is already the planet's fourth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China, the United States and Indonesia. This is despite the fact that in December last year the Brazilian government introduced targets for reducing deforestation by 72 per cent by 2017, as a part of a national climate-change action plan.

Although it has long been known that cattle ranching, which has been expanding continuously since the early 1970s, has been a principaldriver of rainforest destruction in Brazil, the Greenpeace study, entitled "Amazon Cattle Footprint", is thought to be the first detailed assessment of the scale of its impact.

The report uses innovative satellite-mapping techniques to expose direct links between new cattle farms and forest destruction in one of the largest Amazon states, Mato Grosso. One map, for example, reveals the location of industrial-sized slaughterhouses within the state, and shows how they have become the epicentres of major forest destruction as land is cleared to make way for pasture.

Between 1996 and 2006, the report says, the area of pastures in the Amazon grew by approximately 10 million hectares – an area the size of Portugal – to accommodate a vast expansion of the Brazilian cattle herd, which now numbers about 65 million animals.

Between 2002 and 2006, 14.5 million of the total of 20.5 million animals added to the herd were in the Amazon, which now holds about 40 per cent of the national herd, the report says.

It adds that according to Brazilian government data, in 2006 there were three head of cattle in the Amazon for every human inhabitant. Just under 80 per cent of the deforested Amazon is now used for cattle grazing.

"The Brazilian government needs to get a grip on the cattle industry before it completely undermines the country's chances of tackling climate change," said Sarah Shoraka, Greenpeace's forests campaigner. "Right now, huge swathes of rainforest are being cut down to feed the global appetite for beef and leather. As these new maps show, there's a clear link between the location of new cattle ranches and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

"Stopping this expansion offers the best chance of fighting climate change in Brazil, but we need the government to step in before it's too late."

The Amazon basin holds the largest tropical forest in the world, and is the most diverse ecosystem on Earth, playing a vital role in ensuring the region's water supplies, regulating rainfall, and keeping the world'sclimate in balance.

Continued cattle expansion will also have devastating impacts on the Amazon's unique ecosystem and could displace millions of indigenous people, the Greenpeace report says.

In 2006 another major driver of deforestation, soya bean cultivation, has been partly curbed: after pressure from environmentalists, soya growers agreed to a moratorium on growing on newly deforested land. It is likely that the Brazilian cattle industry will now come under similar pressure.

Luis Felipe Carvalho, the secondsecretary at the Brazilian embassy in London, said last night that Brazil did not believe that doubling cattle production would undermine its target to reduce deforestation. It was hoped to use intensive farming techniques to produce more cattle in future from a smaller area of land. "Doubling the cattle industry does not necessarily mean doubling the land the cattle industry uses. We hope to increase productivity, not just the size of the area farmed," he said.

Elephants, Sumatran tigers and some of Asia’s rarest orang-utans will be plunged into a “dire and immediate” fight for their lives this summer as plans are finalised for a massive logging operation in Indonesia aimed at keeping the world supplied with cheap photocopying paper.

The project, which may source paper to office suppliers across the UK, could also unravel years of research spent solving the complex problem of how to reintroduce apes from captivity into the wild. Many of the subjects in a long-running experiment in Sumatra may be accidentally killed as the forest collapses around them.

The granting of the logging licence has provoked anger internationally among a coalition of conservation groups, who allege that it will enhance Indonesia’s position as the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Deforestation led by the unquenchable thirst of the paper and palm-oil industries is seen as the principal culprit. The destruction of Indonesian rainforests accounts for about 4 per cent of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The extensive new logging scheme, in which 124,000 acres (50,000 hectares) of forest will be felled on the island of Sumatra, is to be led by Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) — a group calculated to be the biggest of its type in the world when measured by the amount of forest destroyed. The logging will threaten the last remaining patch of untouched forest near the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park and a critically endangered species of great ape living wild in that area.

As the stakes are raised in the confrontation between conservationists and APP, there are 100 orang-utans under threat from the logging that were reintroduced there from captivity as recently as 2002, after painstaking scientific work. It is the only scheme of its sort that has ever worked with the species.

“It took scientists decades to discover how to successfully reintroduce critically endangered orang-utans from captivity into the wild,” Peter Pratje of the Frankfurt Zoological Society told reporters. “It could take APP just months to destroy an important part of their new habitat.”

Conservation groups in Asia and Europe have condemned the plan and the local government’s granting of a logging licence, highlighting the threat to at least two indigenous tribes whose lives depend on the forest. Zoologists have also warned that deforestation could cause more attacks on humans by Sumatran tigers. Nine people have been savaged to death by tigers in the region so far this year and the number, say experts, could soar as the trees start to come down. The threatened forest is home to about a quarter of the world’s remaining 400 wild Sumatran tigers.

The local elephants may also be under threat of extinction. A report last year by the WWF showed that between 1982 and 2007, deforestation in APP’s main logging centre of Riau province stripped the region of nearly two thirds of its natural forest and may have killed as many as 1,400 Sumatran elephants and 450 Sumatran tigers — respectively 84 per cent and 70 per cent of the populations.

APP and its partner company Sinar Mas Group reject the accusations of conservation groups, saying that the forest was not protected and that the presence of their loggers would prevent illegal logging.

APP and conservation groups have for many years been locked in a war of words over the company’s treatment of Indonesian forest and its alleged attempts to “greenwash” activities with claims of sustainability. In 2007 the company made a public commitment to sourcing all its pulp from acacia plantations, though environmental consultants told The Times that the company remained heavily reliant on wood from natural forests.

The move also comes amid renewed concern throughout Asia over another phase of potential instability in commodity markets: the Indonesian forest cleared in the logging may soon make way for sprawling palm-oil plantations that in turn play a critical role as cars and stomachs compete for the world’s natural resources.

Subsidies for biofuels have skewed historical demand patterns for corn, soya and other edible-oil crops. As grains have found their way into fuel tanks, demand for palm oil has soared and with it the threat of more deforestation. “One worry is the impact of rising commodity prices,” said Andy Tait at Greenpeace.

“Historically, higher potential profits have resulted very quickly in an increased rate of deforestation, with enormous impacts on biodiversity and huge releases of greenhouse gases.” FRom the Times today

"Ferrero wishes to announce its goal to achieve independent and credible third-party verification of the sourcing of all of its cocoa by 2020."

Amazing news! Major chocolate companies Ferrero and Lindt have made unprecedented public commitments to ensuring a slave free supply chain after child care worker Morgan Rayner started a Change.org petition that grew to 110,000 supporters!

What an incredible victory. Just weeks ago, major chocolate companies Ferrero and Lindt were refusing to make a public commitment to eradicating child labour in their supply chains. They hadn’t budged despite years of pressure -- in fact, they were the only two global chocolate brands who had yet to publicly act on the issue.

Just days before Easter, childcare worker Morgan Rayner launched a petition on Change.org calling for a public commitment to a child slave free supply chain.

Her petition took off -- and in less than four days grew to 110,000 signatures around the world. It sparked a social media storm, and soon senior executives from both Lindt and Ferrero reached out directly to Morgan.

Within weeks, both had committed to 100% audited cocoa supply chains by 2020, ensuring an unprecedented commitment to wiping out child labour in the production of their chocolate (see below for more detail on their commitments).

Groups like Stop the Traffik deserve a huge amount of credit for their long and sustained work on this campaign. Their work, together with the amazing surge of energy from Morgan’s petition comprehensively demonstrated the public’s desire for Ferrero and Lindt to make this move, and made inaction impossible.

Morgan’s campaign isn’t over -- she says that there are many things both companies can be doing to be even better, and that much more work is needed to ensure these pledges are implemented. But these commitments represent an incredibly important step in the right direction.

Morgan’s experience shows the amazing ability of one person to take a small but powerful action, and spark a huge movement for change. If there’s something you want to change -- whether it's in your local community or about an international issue -- you should start a petition on Change.org right now.

Thanks for being part of this,

Brie and the Change.org team.

-------------- The Commitments by the Chocolate Companies --------------

Ferrero

Ferrero has committed to “independent and credible third-party verification of the sourcing of all of its cocoa by 2020”. It has expressed “determination to contribute to the elimination of child slave labour,” and committed to transparent, annual reports of its progress.

Lindt

Lindt has reaffirmed its commitment to “eradicating” child slave labour from cocoa production. It has promised to begin verification by by independent “partner” organisations, with the aim of extending this to their entire range by 2020. It will also publish annual progress reports to ensure its actions are “accountable and credible.”